This invention relates to a locker room system particularly adapted for use in schools or other athletic gymnasiums or swimming facilities which would have a locker room for storage of sport or street clothes as an adjunct to the facility.
Locker rooms adjacent such facilities which require the change of street clothes into athletic apparel have long been an adjunct and necessary part of any school or other athletic facility. With increased precautions being taken against theft, the cost of such conventional facilities suited to serve increased numbers of users has become an important design factor in new facilities, as well as the relative increase in labor costs required for cleaning and maintaining such facilities. With total space consumed being another important factor, the art of designing lockers or similar shelves has attempted to reach efficient solutions in several ways. For example, a number of U.S. patents including U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,707,442, 3,427,085 and 3,597,034 disclose shelving systems for library books, small parts and the like, in which a plurality of rows of shelves are adapted to slide toward and away from each other in a direction normal to the open face of the shelves. With such systems, an aisle between two facing shelf rows can be created to give access to those exposed shelves; by sliding one shelf to close that aisle, another aisle on the opposite side thereof can be created, etc. While such a system is particularly useful in some installations where only a single person is seeking access to a particular shelf, it is not particularly desirable in an environment where a large number of persons would be seeking access to the contents of various shelves at one time, since only one aisle at one time can be created according to this system.
Another system is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 1,875,383 in which paired rows of lockers may be pivoted about a vertical axis to open or close off access to these lockers. Such a system does facilitate the preventing unintentional access to the lockers or basket therein, but does not save any floor space and creates a somewhat awkward use pattern for the users.
Still another approach is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,847,265 in which a plurality of sliding compartments or clothes containers are positioned in a circular pattern around a common access and are movable from a closed position to an open position along a radial path. Like the aforesaid system of U.S. Pat. No. 1,875,383, this system provides a round pattern for the users and cannot be conveniently adjusted to a normal rectangular locker room without using much valuable space.